Hedgehog House

In St Brigids Garden we have made our own hedgehog house, you can see a photo of it over on our Instagram here.


If you would like to have one in your garden you can make them from things like old rabbit cages and pots, to just using things like logs and wood, or you can buy one too.

For information on looking after hedgehogs and encouraging them to your garden you can look at this article from BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/breathingplaces/hedgehog_home/

Plant Swap!

Want some free plants? Well there's a great way to get some! Recently some of the members of Blackwater Tidy Towns visited a wildflower talk at a garden centre in Wexford, and after the talk there was a plant swap, so you leave some plants and pick up some others for free!

We traded some of our herbs from St Brigids Garden for some tomato plants. Apparently there were even some cool plants available to swap, like "black tomatoes" and "mallow plants" (from which you can make marshmallow!).

We'd love to go another time!

Flashback Friday!

This week, look away now if you don't like bugs or snakes!!

We had a cool fun day were we were allowed see and touch lots of bugs and animals, and we were also told about them too. 


We're going to Dublin Zoo soon, we can't wait! We'll post all our best pictures on our Instagram, instagram.com/yttblackwater

Tips for leftover food!

Do you often have food leftover at home? There are some easy tips to stop this!

1. You should be careful what you buy, and only buy what you need. Don't just buy something because it is on sale!
2. You can freeze almost all leftover food and eat another day for dinner or lunch.
3. If you still have leftover food you should put it in a special compost bin.
4. If you have some leftover foods you can use them to make something else, like an omelet or even a nice dessert, like banana bread!
5. Did you know you can also use leftover foods to make beauty products? We found some easy ones to make on Irish website Her.ie, and one is even made from potato!

Look at the different masks here and let us know if you try any yourself! www.her.ie/beauty/so-simple-5-amazing-homemade-face-masks


For more tips on stopping food waste you can also visit:
www.stopfoodwaste.ie

Presentation of the Seeds

Remember when we told you about our wing-friendly gardens? Well a few weeks later Blackwater Tidy Towns visited the local primary school and gave out seeds to many children (not only YTT Blackwater members) to bring home and plant!


Our local councillor Oliver Walsh and Principal Mrs O'Brien as well as Blackwater Tidy Towns member Margaret Sinnott helped give out the seeds.

Flashback Friday!

If you follow our Instagram (we hope you all do!) www.instragram.com/yttblackwater you will see we have already started work on St Brigids garden this year. But did you know it's only a new garden? This weeks Flashback Friday will show you what it looked like before!

Our crafts!!

We've been posting our progress over on Instragram (instagram.com/yttblackwater) but we thought we would wait until you could see the finished product before we said anything here!

We painted some old tyres donated to us, with some old paint that was also donated to us!

We're going to put the finished items around the village to decorate, let us know if you spot any!

Flashback Friday!

Here are some "Flashback Friday" photos from activities we have done in the past year. When we're not busy on the internet we also get outside and work hard!! ;)


Here are photos from a nature walk we did around the local area!

Composting Course!

The members of Blackwater Tidy Towns went to some meetings the past few weeks about food waste and composting, which was helped by Wexford County Council Environment Department.



They're going to be teaching us more about it this summer, but we think building a wormery sounds gross!

Flashback Friday!

For the month of May we're going to try do a "Flashback Friday" every week, and show you some of our older photos from before we had the blog!

This week, our giant sunflowers!!! Did you know that we had a competition to see who could grow the biggest sunflower? It was difficult to decide as they all grew so big, taller than most of us!

We're going to do it again this year!

Strawberry Pavlova Recipe

Kevin Dundon is a famous chef from our very own Wexford! We think his recipe for Strawberry Pavlova will be delicious and we can't wait for the strawberries in our garden to start growing again this year!

You can check out the recipe (plus many others) on The Taste.ie here: thetaste.ie/wp/strawberry-pavlova-recipe-by-chef-kevin-dundon/



What's your favourite way to eat strawberries?

Easy Garden Craft DIY Videos

Just in time for the long Bank Holiday weekend, we found some videos on YouTube with craft ideas for your garden.

We searched hard and we only want to share with you easy things you can do at home, as some of the videos are really hard or they need a lot of different things to make them.

We hope you have fun making them!













If you make something please share it with us in the comments below!

Home Made Mint Sauce Recipe

We all know lamb is popular in Spring and during Easter too, so we've found this simple mint sauce recipe from Safe Food.eu for a fresh and easy to make side.

Mint is easy to grow at home and is really versatile in it's uses, from garnishing a dessert to home-made beauty products! Why not give it a try?


http://www.safefood.eu/Healthy-Eating/Recipes/Dinner/Mint-sauce.aspx

Carrot Face Mask

Coming up to Easter we think of many things including flowers, eggs, chocolate and the Easter bunny. Another thing we think about and start to see more, are carrots!

We grow plenty of carrots in St Brigids Garden, our special growing area in the village. They're pretty easy to grow and while we usually just eat them boiled at Sunday or in the occasional salad, you can use them for lots of other things too!

We found a really easy recipe for making a home made carrot face mask on Live Strong.com. Carrots are supposed to help rejuvenate your skin because they are antiseptic. This recipe also contains honey to help moisturize your skin too.



http://www.livestrong.com/article/95559-make-carrot-facial-mask/

Annual Spring Clean 2017

We would like to thank everyone for joining us for our spring clean this year on April 1st. Despite the rain we all had a great time (no joke!) and the village looked much tidier after we finished.

It was great to involve the community and have many people join us to help improve our village and keep it clean!

We especially cleaned around the recycling bins in the village. It's good that people recycle but also when the bins are full some people still drop their bags off and it can leave a mess. Also not everyone uses the bins for recycling and that's why we need to keep it clean!

We were very busy working but we took some photos that we will try upload here, and also on our Instagram page too.

Instagram!

Check out our new Instagram page for photos of our village and the work we're getting up to!

https://www.instagram.com/yttblackwater

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

St. Patrick's Day Recycled Crafts

As it's St. Patrick's Day today I thought I would show you some cool ideas I found on the internet to celebrate the day. This craft you can make using reycled items. It's really simple to make, all you need is a toilet roll tube, orange string, black and green paper. You can find this awesome craft on Pinterest.





Here is another idea I thought was pretty cool. All you need paper plates, paint and scissors. Again this is another craft that is easy to make. It's really quick and easy to make. This also can be found on Pinterest.



Hope you have fun making these crafts.
YTT Blackwater Lifestyle.

Green Waste Food Challenge!

The Green Waste Food Challenge is a month long programme helping households reduce food waste. It is estimated that households throw out between €700 and €1000 worth of food each year, so this can challenge can also help you save money too.

Does your bin look like this?

Blackwater Tidy Towns are going to host a Green Waste Food Challenge and are inviting families from the local community to take part, and we will post some updates on their progress and giving you some helpful information to also help stop food waste in your home too!

If you are interested in taking part in the challenge you can contact Margert S or Barbara B.

"Wing Friendly" Gardens

Bee Movie

Do you know what a "wing friendly" garden is? It's a garden that attracts butterflies and bees. Butterflies and bees are important for pollination which helps produce more crops every year so plants don't die (it's kind of like the film Bee Movie).

"Wing friendly" gardens have food, shelter and pesticide free areas so butterflies and bees can live happily there.

Blackwater Youth Tidy Towns are inviting people in the village to make a section of their gardens "wing friendly" and we will give out some free seeds and instructions to help you do this! If you would like to take part, please contact Margaret S.

A butterfly garden

Pancake Tuesday!

Finally, it's that time of year again! Everyone loves pancakes, but there can always be a panic when the day comes around trying to search online and find the best recipe and ingredients. We're here to help! This recipe from Donal Skehan that we found in the Irish Times is absolutely fabulous, and what we really like is that it's from a home-grown Irish chef and using the best Irish ingredients!

For the ingredients we encourage everyone to use Irish made flour (like Odlums) and we're also lucky in that we can use Wexford Creamery milk and butter (with some suppliers right here here in Blackwater) and while in the countryside it's easy to find a friend with chickens and a few spare eggs, no matter where you are it's always best to use chicken-friendly, free-range eggs (in Wexford we love Kilincooley Eggs too!). For toppings, our favourite pancake topping is strawberries, and luckily we saved a few from our summer garden last year and froze them!

Enjoy!

Pancakes from wwwinstructables.com

Welcome!

Thanks for visiting our new page.


This blog will contain lots of fun and informative tips to help you out in the garden or around your local area. We will also be uploading photographs of our own projects here in Blackwater so you can follow our gardening, culinary and up-cycling progress!

We will be posting new updates regularly, so please come back and visit us again soon!